so I'm still plugging away on this landscape lighting project or garden
lighting as I would call it and I'm using these whisker boxes at the bottom
of each fence posts that are mounting a light on to make the electrical
connection to the fitting now obviously in the past when perhaps we were
terminating an armored cable into a plastic enclosure we'd have to you know
put the gland in first and then we'd have to put a lock nut in and then we'd
have to put a banjo earthing ring sorry Gary and then finally another lock nut
and try to terminate a fly lead onto the banjo maybe bend it up a bit to get the
screw in in short and absolute pain now of course we could use an earthing nut
or a piranha nut in a plastic enclosure and that takes some of the challenges
actor ball boxes from whisker are so brilliantly small I think it struggle to
fit either of those in here so whisker have come up with another solution the
earth clamp bar it's this solid piece of breasts which just sits inside this box
the 308 box and as you can see here it's been machined on the back in order to
fit around all the mouldings of the plastic in there so it's in there really
nicely a little bit of flexibility of movement but it's there ready to receive
the armored cable glands now I'm sure the more eagle-eyed among you will look
at that and think well how am I going to tighten up the lock nut onto it when
there's not enough room to spin it around in there now this may be one of
those times when we have to kind of fight against all of those ingrained
experiences and instincts when I say that you don't actually need a lock nut
inside here okay so let's just think about the purpose of the lock nut
normally what does it do well it serves two purposes doesn't it it holds the
gland mechanically into whatever you're connecting to and when it's tight it
forms part of the electrical connection between the armoring the gland and the
banjo while the whisker box actually provides the mechanical connection for
the gland because it has a threaded connection here and when you do up this
little brass screw on the front of the earth clamp bar here you can see it
locks onto the threads of the gland and it locks it into place which gives it
that all-important electrical connection via cpc's so both of those functions of
the lock nut are carried out in other ways
there's also another screw on the top here that allows you to either run a fly
lead out to the terminals that clip into the whisker box or as I'm going to do on
this one just connect your CPC directly onto there
of course it's perfect here because I've got an SWA coming in and going out now
one of the main reasons I wanted to make this video was to answer a question I
couldn't find anywhere else when I was looking and that is can I use this earth
clamp bar in whiskers smaller version of this box now which could do a few
different versions of this clamp to fit into different boxes but I couldn't find
a specific one for this smaller box maybe no one's expecting you to
terminate armand into a small box like this but a small armoured shouldn't
cause too much trouble with the connections inside there it looked from
all the promotional material that I could find that it should fit in there
the form factor of the smaller box looks almost as if the bigger box has just
been cut in half so let's have a look at it it seems that the clamp sits inside
there quite neatly but what I found earlier is that when I tried to do up to
armored cable glands into here one of them goes in absolutely fine no problem
but then when you try and put the next one in it actually won't fit in there it
will not screw up into the fitting the holes it just ever so slightly
misaligned so when I try and put that second one in it's just ever so slightly
out so it just doesn't fit in there so that's answered my question this earth
clamp bar is not designed to be used in a smaller box so if you've ever wondered
that hopefully now you know the answer now you may have noticed on using storm
glands here so please check out the video that I've made on those as well
but while I've got you let's just have a quick look at some of the other features
of this box it can either be fixed directly to a surface using the screw
holes in the corners or it also comes with this little bracket on the back
that can also be fixed in place and then the Box just sort of snaps onto it there
but whichever method you use to fix it there's no holes into the box itself
which really helps to maintain the IP ratings on here then inside you've got
this little kind of connector block which can be mounted in one of about
eight different ways inside here and there's just such attention to detail
inside here even to the point where the plastic around the holes is made of a
different material to that surrounding it to improve the grip of the connector
block inside there and once you've got this connector block in place and maybe
you want to make the connections easier to access you can actually unclip the
top of the connector block from the holder there
really good in it and of course finally the lid is secured just by using these
quarter turn fixings which just lock it into place so there we go
we've got the whisker box and the earth clamp bar that sits inside there and
makes electricians lives easier and here at effix
we like that thank you very much for watching